


go ahead, be gouged open by love

by windupclock



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: (prose poetry. but nonetheless), Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Misogyny, Poetry, comical amounts of apostrophe, i have a lot of feelings about ophelia okay.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 00:35:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22824982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windupclock/pseuds/windupclock
Summary: They say that though her body is long-gone, you can see her sleeping when the sun strikes the water right.
Relationships: Hamlet/Ophelia (Hamlet)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26





	go ahead, be gouged open by love

**Author's Note:**

> title from 'on this the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the titanic, we reconsider the buoyancy of the human heart' by laura lamb brown-lavoie.
> 
> wrote this instead of working on an actual essay about hamlet because i love ophelia too much!

A girl lives not in the pond by the royal gardens of the castle. 

I’m sure you can picture her: deathly pale skin, eyes closed, floating on the surface. Her hair streams around her; it has been many colors, but you are probably thinking it red. Is it the color of roses or blood?

Though she has been there for a while, her body shows no sign of it. You must remember: she cannot look dead. No waterlogged skin for her, no tinge of bluish-red from livor mortis, no corpse-wax wrapping her in a tomb of her own creation. If not for the pallor of her face, you would think she was sleeping when they took her out of the water. You would think she was sleeping when they laid her in the grave. 

You must remember: she is a tragic maiden. Her beauty must persist after she drowns herself, or we would not have our tragedy. Nothing compares to the mourning they give a pretty girl. What brother would leap into a grave to catch a cadaver in his arms? Who would love the rot of flesh with the force of forty thousand brothers?

Don’t worry: Ophelia is only closing her eyes for a moment. She will not bother us with her decay. You will not have to think of her as flesh. She is no more than what she represents.

The canary in the coal mine once sang so sweetly. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, but Ophelia is but a symptom of the contagion—a bellwether sacrifice at the altar of revenge and tragedy and revenge-tragedy, the cycle of action and reaction and inaction that haunts the castle.  _ Lord, ward off our sins and the buzzing flies circling that which is not yet a corpse. _ Like Iphigenia: it does not matter which gods you pray to; when they want blood, it will be a girl’s. She is not herself the infection. She cannot bring pillars down on her own. You must remember: she is symbolic. If you are not careful, you will see through her.

* * *

Let’s set the scene: roll back the end of the play. Come on, hurry—we don’t need Fortinbras for this one, nor the swords and goblets and flights of angels. Come back to Ophelia’s funeral, if we can call it that; so little of this is about her, in the end. She was always incidental to the heart of the action, but we’ll pause here anyway. We won’t dwell on the posturing or the clash of brother against lover. Cut them out of your imagining entirely: here, there is only a girl in the grave.

Why did she do it? 

We can imagine that the clowns (one of them a gravedigger) are wrong: she deserved a Christian burial. If the water comes to the girl, the coin will land on heads. If the girl comes to the water, the coin will land on tails. The water took her life, or the madness, or Hamlet himself albeit indirectly. Her poor fingers trembled with the force of her sobs or her laughter and she could not cling to the willow. Her fall was a plummet and the water filled her lungs as she tried to call out for help. Ophelia died as she lived: deprived of agency, without any choice in the matter.

We could, alternately, give her back a little agency. Not too much—let’s not be ridiculous; we will not let go of the rope, but we can loosen our grip just a little. Give her enough slack to hang herself with, and she will. They still find her planted among the waterlilies, in the end.

We will grant her this: Ophelia lets go. She squeezes her eyes shut as the water swallows her, and she does not thrash and struggle against the petticoats that weigh her down, heavy with quenched thirst. This much we will permit: Ophelia may kill herself.

The question wells up quickly:  _ why? _

Grief over her father, of course. Why else does a girl kill herself if not for a man? A man killed by a man that she loved; the twisted webs men weave shall wrap her like a fly and feast on her tragic bones. Rejected by Hamlet, her brother overseas in France, her father gutted behind a curtain like a rat—what more does she have to live for? The violets withered when her father died, and Ophelia’s death is nothing more than an inevitability.

* * *

We do not ask: where is Ophelia’s mother?

She lived a life before she died, although we see so little of it we might think she stepped forth from the earth to love and ache and break and drown, in that order. We can imagine the stilted childhood of a noblegirl: gowns and flowers and endless attempts to learn etiquette into her strides. We can imagine childhood affection strung between her and Hamlet and Laertes, the games they might have played in the halls at Elsinore. We can imagine the wistful rose of her pining for Hamlet, the dusk of her asleep in his bed, the choral coral of her clutching a letter scrawled in his hand. We can imagine the hands Queen Gertrude might have smoothed over her hair, the braids plaited there by a woman who never had a girl of her own to teach the art—and yet, we can imagine, didn’t she?

When the Queen weeps over her near the end, she mourns that she never got to see her wed to Hamlet; we can imagine a deeper grief lingering behind the words:  _ O that my son took you and broke you and split your mind from your body, O that I never called you daughter. _ Let’s spin a eulogy out of a petal-strewn grave. They are the only two women in the play. We have to read between the lines.

* * *

They say that though her body is long-gone, you can see her sleeping when the sun strikes the water right. You may catch a song on the wind, but you will never pick the lyrics out no matter how you strain your ears. Her hair tangles with the weeds, and her skirts billow around her, pure virgin white gone brackish.

Sit by the edge of the pond for a while. Gather them in your lap, though it may take some hunting to find them all: rosemary, pansies, fennel, columbines, rue, and a daisy. Do not bring her any violets—they grow like weeds where her body is planted, but they do not say she made a good end. Be patient (be dutiful, be quiet, be long-suffering) for long enough, and weave the flowers together, and cast your crown into the water. When it sinks, if you have plaited the stems delicately enough, the never-princess of Denmark may rise.

Do not be alarmed. There will be pondscum in her hair, of course; her skin will bloom green with algae where it touched the surface. Focus your eyes, and the trappings will disappear. She will be a girl again and not a monster (a spirit again and not a haunting). Her body shows no sign of it, untouched by the violence of life and death, although her cheeks will be narrower than you expect, her eyes a shade or two darker. 

She will not answer your questions, but if you listen close, you may start to piece together the riddle of her singing into something heavy and bittersweet with meaning—blackberry-burst on your tongue, you will start to understand. 

Unweave the tragedy of tragic girls. Fish the circlet out of the water and place it on her bowed head. Sing her a melody of your own, plucked from the air.

Hold your hand out to Ophelia. Take her home: she has been floating long enough.


End file.
